How do we spend attention? Clicks, page views, then shares -- they all have taken turns, alone or in combination, as metrics for advertisers to tell whether to invest in one platform over another.

Digital body language can indeed be measured. Can it be measured more accurately? For example, are we closing the gap between media dollars spent and efficiency? More importantly, are we learning better ways to close the intention-action gap? Because attention without action is only half the equation.

Experimenting with Attention Metrics

The Financial Times is experimenting with time on site. In an interview with Sam Petulla#, commercial director of digital advertising for the FT Jon Slade said Financial Times readers are spending six times more time with the site than on other business news sites.

The media organization is experimenting with its content inventory to figure out how to deliver it efficiently and with impact for the brand.

We’re working from a hypothesis that one hour is our currency, with a minimum of five seconds of exposure.

The FT In addition works with Chartbeat, a web analytics firm, and WebSpectator, a company that sells ads based on time spent and counts Univision, Coca-Cola, and Sephora among its customers.

All in an effort to define what "engagement" translates into online now that we know that even shares occur with partial or no content consumption and/or individual attention.

Engagement, the new (media) frontier

We've been around this block before. With more advanced platforms and some experience of how people view content online and pass it on,we now have a better (read: more accurate) measure.

Upworthy, which provides a steady stream of important and irresistibly shareable stuff, has come up with the best way to answer the question and is now ready to share the code # (follow the link to view a dynamic demo of how it works):

Clicks and page views, long the industry standards, are drastically ill-equipped for the job. [...] It’s in everyone’s interest — from publishers to readers to advertisers — to move to a metric that more fully measures attention spent consuming content.

[...] Attention Minutes measures everything from video player signals about whether a video is currently playing to a user’s mouse movements to which browser tab is currently open — all to determine whether the user is still engaged.

Marketers want to make sure they are stretching their ad dollar. While powerful analytics provide plenty of data, the sweet spot is figuring out the pieces that matter, those that move the needle for the business.

Publishers may soon be able to go from suggesting how to spend it (editorially) to how to spend it (in ad dollars value).

Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

Making Sense: Social Data

Gallup's Buzzy Social Media Report Appears 'Deeply Flawed' 2012 called and wants its data back. AdWeek: The social media marketing stats are based on surveys that were performed back in December 2012 and January 2013. In the disruptive world of online marketing, 18 months is a virtual lifetime ago. Nearly every social media platform has gone through significant changes since Gallup collected its data.

Rethinking Social Media Marketing. Snarketing 2.0, Ron Shevlin: One of the things that drives me nuts about studies like Gallup’s is that it asks consumers how influential something is on their “purchase decisions” as if all decisions are influenced by the same things, and to the same degree.

Understanding Social Data. My own take: Of course people will not tell you the way they interact with something influences them. We think about influence as a thing we exert when we pay attention to something. The root cause of confusion comes when we try to force fit a marketing definition into life -- it just does not work.

Making do: 50 Ways

50 Ways to Create a Job that Makes Good. Ashoka: What’s contained within this site is not a magic bullet: you won’t get a job by simply reading each page. But, if you commit to doing every exercise, with authenticity, serious effort, hustle and follow through, you will discover your path, find your ideal career, and get hired.

50 Job Resources for Makers. My contribution: What works is a plan for yourself -- a road map for your own learning and career. What are some of the things you should do today to realign with your own purpose and work?

Making it: Integrative

Integrative Ideas and Social Brands. @FarisYacob: Publishers are trying to wean themselves off their click addiction and develop their native offerings. Search remains the key online advertising driver in dollar terms, especially on mobile. It is social that has becomes the primary battleground for agency ideas, precisely because it cuts across all disciplines and, unlike search, allows room for actual ideas.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

This summer I will be preparing new material to help marketers and business types with content and activation. Here are my confirmed upcoming talks.

I went back and looked at a presentation I gave at Inbound four years ago on writing engaging content for the next web and the socializing of information. It's a bit of a mouthful -- it does sound a lot like today's headlines, doesn't it?

We were beginning to see examples of what I put forth then, yet many were struggling with it. Organizing around production and publishing to go beyond getting attention to keeping it and developing relationships via content is still difficult.

Of course, today everyone is talking about content marketing.

Here's the summary of my thinking at the time:

Content-centered marketing is undergoing a transformation, one where the content is moving from:

promotional to non-partisan -- some call it thought leadership

highly-controlled to less-controlled -- more legos than logos

occasional to ongoing -- life stream your business

corporate voice to authentic, personal voice -- who should embody the voice of the company?

one-way to conversational -- the one overarching concern remains that of message consistency, and effectiveness

How do you keep that with such a messy medium that is conversation? Learn how losing control of your content is the best thing that could happen for your business.

Today, that is not enough, everyone is doing it or saying that they are. To realize the value of a brand's digital investment takes innovation at the service level, as we discussed recently at the Consumer Goods Technology summit, technology or content for its own sake is pointless.

Making the effort, just generating content, having branded accounts in all major social networks and posting everywhere makes little sense without a game plan and the ability to play it smarter.

Think about the tools and services you return to -- they are the ones that put you in control, where you can decide the settings, the terms of engagement, if you will. We do not need to be all technology-savvy to adopt technology; and here's precisely the difficulty for brands.

Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

In this commencement address for the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern University, Dan Pink shares a personal story about the wisest advice he ever got on how to live.

A fellow linguistic, he received this advice from a professor (minute 7:36):

Sometimes you need to write to figure it (nda: what you are thinking) out.

That is wise advice indeed -- and not just about how to figure out what you are thinking through writing. Pink asks the students to engage in an experiment, to go out into the world and find someone in their mid career stage, someone who they admire, who is doing something that contributes to the world, and ask that person how they got there.

97/100 times, the smartest, most interesting, most dynamic, most impactful people answer will answer that question like this: "it's a long story".

My parents and friends did ask me the same question Pink posits at the beginning of his talk, "what are you going to do with all that?" due to my picking Liberal Arts/linguistics at the University of Bologna. When someone asks me how I got to where I got today, as GapJumpers did in its interview series on Medium, I do answer, "It's a long story".

Good storytelling begins with figuring out what you think and you do that by experiencing, observing, and trying things. How to get motivated to write is often by getting on with the actual writing.

As Pink says:

Sometimes, the only way to discover who you are or what life you should lead is to do less planning and more living — to burst the double bubble of comfort and convention and just do stuff.

Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

Eon Pritchard about "digital strategy" in an interview part of the where the puck is going series on Medium by GapJumpers#:

On the digital side you have data driven marketing which has much more in common with what we used to call direct response than advertising, then there’s the apps, services and digital products like the Fuelband with this deeper engagement component for the more interested brand users.

Whereas what we call advertising is still very much about just getting brands noticed and recognized by the rest of us, who don’t pay much attention and just need an easy purchase of baked beans without having to think about it. Both things are good, but we should be mindful of the distinction. I don't have any problem saying this now.

Since (I hope) we now recognize that it is not a question of either/or and instead it is about both/and, where do we insert social media and content marketing?

If we separate the platforms from the content, then we say okay, we have social networks and what you can do technically on them over here, and we have copy, visuals over there.

However, that does not address what we do with interaction and behavior. And that's where many brands get stuck, to the question of how do we get people to do our bidding?

Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

A recent report by Gallup# reveals what we should already know -- when we are immersed in social situations, we align our expectations accordingly. People say they are not influenced by social media in their purchasing decisions, brands are throwing away their advertising dollars, concludes Gallup.

Walking up to a group of friends who are chatting and hitting them with a sales pitch does not work in real life, and it does not work in real life, online. It hardly seems to be news to the community managers who have been involved in social for a few years.

Richness of social data overlooked

The survey fails to "reveal" how -- through social media -- successful organizations are investing in understanding consumer behavior, how people interact with products and services, and finding ways to deliver better experiences.

It does not talk about the richness of social data and its current applications. Of course people will not tell you the way they interact with something influences them. We think about influence as a thing we exert when we pay attention to something.

The root cause of confusion comes when we try to force fit a marketing definition into life -- it just does not work.

Do a little homework, look for a second answer and you begin to see a different picture when it comes to social media.

While some brands took a wait-and-see approach, joined late or look(ed) to social as a way to stretch dollars and off page impressions, early experimenters have moved to improving product/service offerings and experience based on customer interaction.

Why innovation should be on the marketing roadmap

Separate the platforms from content, and you begin to see how smart organizations take the lead because they do use data to make decisions about where to rebalance their product mix, what to do more of and what to strip away and simplify, and how to increase their leverage based on the attention they cultivate.

The very platforms upon which brands have been sharecropping without innovating for themselves, the social networks, are now accelerating the pace of experimentation.

Twitter is taking advantage of the global attention the #WorldCup is receiving and helping connect fans to their teams and the games; Facebook is testing single purpose apps in its Creative Labs#.

This is the real story -- and opportunity of social.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

When people have their own reasons for doing something, not yours, they believe those reasons more deeply and adhere to their behaviors more strongly.

If you find that people rate themselves lower on the accomplishment scale (as in getting things done), you may find that there is an environmental obstacle that is preventing them from moving forward. Asking them to self assess, then offering help in getting past the obstacle is a way to build momentum toward your (how shared) goal.

So your job as motivator and persuader is to reset the context and surface people's own reasons for doing something.

Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

"Now, the conversation is becoming even wider. We trust we won’t lose focus. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, silos are nobody’s friend, and it doesn’t matter who’s living in the silo, whether it’s a DBA or a router administrator.

Everything is distributed. And when everything is distributed, everyone has a stake in the conversation." [source: O'Reilly]

The topic is technology, it could easily be organizations.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

What is influence? For a decade, Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has served as a touchstone for those who believe that influence resides in the hands of a select few. Not so, says a new generation of marketers. They believe that thanks to the democratizing power of the Internet, anyone can be an Influential. Both camps are wrong. True influence flows from drawing together people with shared interests. This session focuses on the process of identifying areas of relevancy among your customers and prospects, building community, and allowing others to amplify your influence as you meet their needs.

Three years ago SXSW selected this solo talk. I think somewhere in Australia there is a video of the whole session, which I then modified for a conference in June of the same year.

individual sphere -- how we can draw from our inner source of motivation and find the levers that help us act as leaders, community builders, go-to people at work, etc.

market force -- this is the area of focus for marketers, especially when it comes to identifying and leveraging influence; smart businesses also learn how to develop influence

energy or undercurrent at species level -- there is a broader conversation around influence that impacts how culture comes to be and drive relationships between people, countries, etc.

We often think about influence in terms of exploiting it, yet so rarely about how to develop it and/or in terms of positive impact that is greater than self interest, or longer term than right this minute/quarter.

The way I look at influence taps into what we feel deep down when we tap into a sense of contribution, awareness, and mindfulness. It is often discouraging to read accounts of success being associated with ruthlessness, and alas as a social species we tend to emulate what we see/perceive to be working.

This frame of reference is what influences us the most.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

Some (confirmed) upcoming events where I will talk in the next couple of months.

Cleveland, OH

Joe Pulizzi also asked me to be the emcee for one of the main content tracks at Content Marketing World and I look forward to helping connect the dots and build excitement at the event.

If I am lucky, in addition to meeting an accomplished roster of peers, I will get to meet Kevin Spacey (I'm a big fan of his work). Below is the description I submitted.

CONTENT MARKETING WORLD: FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY LAB

In this hands-on session, we will learn to:

Use audience segmentation and linguistic analysis data to inform and quantify a cohesive content marketing strategy to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action

Develop a content calendar to support a proper hierarchy of themes based on audience research and provide better internal governance and accountability across channels and divisions

Close the gap in content development resources by enrolling Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to contribute their expertise to marketing programs

Extrapolate useful lessons from the specific strategies industry leaders are employing to grow their fan bases and build trust in their brands

What it takes: in collaboration with Shannon Paul, VP, Social Media, how Fifth Third Bank used content marketing and digital media to help individual job seekers find work with Retweet to Reemploy – and enrolling influencers to spread the word in social media.

How Fifth Third Bank is using content marketing and digital media to help raise money for cancer research and attract new checking account customers. By asking if a checking account could help fund the fight against cancer, the bank found a new way to build relationships with consumers in a way that puts people and their stories front and center.

Examine some of the unique regulatory obstacles the industry faces and the innovative tactics some FS brands are using to overcome those obstacles

Track progress through a comprehensive measurement framework

Boston, MA

It has been a couple of years since I spoke at Inbound and I am thrilled to be taking the stage for a bold talk on a topic that is near and dear to my heart.

Thanks to the inimitable Laura Fitton I will have a chance to ive out loud and to be reunited with many colleagues who are doing good work.

INBOUND: BECOMING A CONVERSATION AGENT

This talk is about the history and future of achieving human potential. Based on my lifelong work in working with, researching, analyzing, and understanding how people develop and learn, and building frameworks to affect behavior in support of both. A five-minute talk on 2021: Uploading Humanism. Areas of focus:

The learning framework that changed it all

A discussion of environment design to affect behavior

What makes effective teams work

The value of continuous learning and how to achieve it

A weighing of what we are leaving behind and what we are taking with us

Attendees will leave with a strong grasp of how to approach mindfully the new world of work and make smarter moves with innovation to impact experience, social to accelerate relationships and scale, and technology to enable emerging models.

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Hope we will get a chance to meet.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.